01 January 2026, Volume 25 Issue 1

  

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  ″Affection Based on Mingfen″: Modern Writers and Their Traditional Marriages —The Case of Hu Shih and Jiang Dongxiu

  MA Chunhua

  2026, 25(1): 5-17.

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  ″Affection Based on Mingfen″was a notion Hu Shih first put forward in 1918. Its earlier form was the idea of ″mingfen-generated love″ that he had coined in the United States in 1914 to distinguish it from the Western ideal of ″self-made love″. Because the formula deviates from the Enlightenment discourse of free romantic love, it is usually read as Hu Shi′s self-defence for accepting an arranged match. Yet a close look at his own marriage to Jiang Dongxiu shows that the traditional mingfen did breed authentic affection. ″Affection Based on mingfen″ inverts the classical binary of qing (sentiment) and li (propriety). The canonical formula ″originating in qing and restrained by li″ (fa hu qing, zhi hu li) is turned into ″originating in li and fulfilled by qing″. The mingfen imposed by an arranged marriage is only the initially involuntary starting-point from which affection may grow; free personal choice remains the necessary condition for love to reach completion. For Hu Shih, love — whether ″self-made″ or generated by mingfen — must in the end be validated by individual freedom. Thus ″affection out of mingfen″ weaves a thread through past and present, East and West, outlining an eternal tradition of ″creating and expressing emotion through freedom″.
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  Is Agent-Regret a Moral Emotion?

  ZHAO Lixin

  2026, 25(1): 18-28.

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  Bernard Williams appeals to agent-regret to show that factors outside an agent′s control pose a challenge to traditional moral systems, but this move has met with criticism. Appealing to moral normativity, these critics adopt various strategies to dissolve the presumed correlation between moral responsibility and action-outcomes. They contend that the concept of agent-regret lacks inherent rationality, and that agent-regret is merely a general emotional response. However, Williams′s account of the link between voluntariness and responsibility, together with his distinction between regret and remorse, defuses these objections and safeguards his projected turn to an ethics of life. As a special moral emotion, agent-regret also illustrates Williams′s larger project: to explore how emotion, moral luck and agency intersect, and to mark the boundary between his view and prevailing moral theories.
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  How can Affect Antagonize Capitalist Domination? —A Critical Inquiry into an Emancipatory Pathway

  CHEN Shuyan

  2026, 25(1): 29-39.

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  The dilemma of affect in modern society implies its inherent emancipatory potential while also highlights the difficulty of actualizing this potential. Although affect is fundamentally opposed to the private property of civil society, in reality, civil society systematically represses affect as an intrinsic dimension of life, distorting and compressing it into collective affect and private desire that serve as ideological supplements. Following Marx′s critique, Adorno further reveals that under conditions of monopoly capitalism, affect is transformed through the mechanism of false projection into an ideological tool used by rulers to divert economic contradictions. Meanwhile, Laclau, within the context of neoliberalism, attempts to ontologically reconstruct the suturing-transgressive dimension of affect investment. However, their recourse to rational grounds once again falls into the presupposition of economic transparency, thereby continuing to confine affect as either entirely passive or possessing only limited transgressive capacity. In response, Badiou points out that modern capitalism actually operates in a religious manner, and what truly antagonizes it is affect faithful to a singular event. In this event-oriented narrative, the emancipatory potential of affect is no longer bound by rational discipline; instead, it becomes the immanent driving force of truth procedure, continually orienting toward new singular events.
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  Sensible Misery and Affective Therapy in the Digital Age: On Bernard Stiegler′s ″Politics of Love″

  CHEN Xiaotong

  2026, 25(1): 40-48.

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  The deep integration of digital technology into contemporary life, while offering distance-free and convenient communication, has led to the hollowing out of social relationships. The lack of profound emotional connections has turned ″love″ into a problem, manifesting as the loss of individual uniqueness and sensible misery. In the context of the hyper-industrial epoch, Bernard Stiegler revisits the issue of ″love″ and proposes self-love, desire, and care as remedies to contemporary sensible misery. Self-love constructs the affective structure of a political community, serving as the fundamental emotional bond connecting individuals and collectives. The belief in and desire for passionate attachment inspire the creativity of amateurs, reshaping the economy of desire through the production of spiritual values. Care triggers actions of self-love and mutual loving, endowing life with value and meaning through aesthetic participation, thus resisting nihilism. Self-love, desire, and care constitute the core of Stiegler′s ″politics of love″, providing a critical approach to the reconstruction of emotional relationships between individuals and society in the digital era through a pharmacology of sensibility.
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  The Growth of the Youth and Farewell to the 1990s: Revisiting the ″1990s Narrative″ in Shuang Xuetao′s Fiction

  SU Xin

  2026, 25(1): 49-59.

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  Shuang Xuetao, renowned for his literary reconstructions of northeastern Chinese lived experiences in the 1990s, serves as a critical entry point for examining the contemporary upsurge of 1990s narrative. While the authentic representation of the 1990s has been foregrounded in these texts, the farewell to the 1990s is clearly articulated by the author. In Shuang′s texts, the gradually growing youthful narrator always undertakes the dual functions of retelling and bidding farewell to that history. The ″1990s″ depicted through the perspectives of the younger generation operates not as an object of nostalgia, but to some extent rather as a complex chronotope that has been reconfigured: the generational shifts have supplanted the linear progression of time, while the North-South dichotomy has reconfigured the structural perception of space. Rather than simply interpreting Shuang′s texts as elegiac invocations of the 1990s, it is more inspiring to position them as a coming-of-age narrative documenting the generational maturation within China′s post-reform literary sphere, and to regard them as materials that deepen the understanding of the current 1990s narrative.
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  Hong Kong′s ″Long-haired Youth″ and Hong Kong Literature and Culture in the 1960s and 1970s: A Study Centered on the Creative Works of Liu

  LUO Xinyi

  2026, 25(1): 60-71.

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  In the mid-to-late 1960s, the streets of Hong Kong saw a surge of young people who were sporting long hair, becoming a highly visible phenomenon and trend in Hong Kong society at the time. The emergence of Hong Kong′s long-haired youth not only highlighted the immense influence of hippie culture but also represented a new phenomenon generated within Hong Kong′s social context, involving multiple factors such as economic development and population growth. Writers Liu Yichang, Xi Xi, and Ye Si all depicted long-haired youth in their respective works from the 1970s, creating rich portrayals of Hong Kong′s long-haired youth that reflected different perspectives and writing styles. The long-haired youth of Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s became a collective memory for Hong Kong people of that era. They profoundly influenced Hong Kong literature and culture by promoting identity construction and group recognition among Hong Kong′s youth, as well as consolidating and developing local consciousness among Hong Kong residents.
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  Sick City: Disease Writing in Hong Kong Literature

  YANG Sen

  2026, 25(1): 72-81.

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  Hong Kong literature contains numerous works depicting disease. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, new-generation writers such as Hon Lai-chu and Wong Won-ha have explored urban alienation and the oppression of modern individuals under the performance-driven society through portrayals of diseases like hypersomnia, floating syndrome, and chronic fatigue syndrome—revealing, more troublingly, the self-exploitation inherent within it. Writers including Chow Man-lut, Poon Kwok-ling, and Cheung Man-wan reflect on Hong Kong′s excessive fear of infectious diseases and the anthropocentrism mirrored in culling practices through their depictions of animal diseases. Meanwhile, Lee Chi-leung and Xi Xi draw on personal experiences of disease and healthcare to examine how the modern medical system disciplines patients. With the rise of digital medical technologies, the human body has been reduced to electronic resources, further alienating doctors and patients. These works interrogate the public′s prejudice and discrimination toward disease and question the medicalization of disease and the hegemony of medical authority, aiming to help patients reclaim their sense of dignity and self.
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  Cultural Memory and Placemaking: Tourismization of the City from the Perspective of Host-guest Sharing

  GUO Yunjiao

  2026, 25(1): 82-91.

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  With the development of urban tourism, the memory of city streets and lanes has become a complex system. As an interactive and symbiotic collection of comforts, the urban scene composed of residents′ daily-life world has a bidirectional function and value for host and guest. The smoothness of residents′ place use affects their sense of homeliness, and the generation of homeliness deeply depends on communicative memory in daily-life interactions. ″Viewing places″ as a form of tourist memory is a way of finding ″homeliness″ in the everyday scenes of the visited place. The excavation and preservation of intergenerational places that sustain residents′ cultural and emotional memory are not only an important way to generate residents′ homeliness, but also a powerful means to reshape tourists′ experience of homeliness and construct a familiar place.
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  Enlightenment of Modern Thought in Lingnan, and the Reform of Folk Balladry: Taking the Creation of Cantonese Tunes in Zheng Guanggong′s Newspapers as an Example

  DENG Haitao

  2026, 25(1): 92-100.

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  Zheng Guanggong transformed folk balladry into a carrier of ideological enlightenment. He created columns in newspapers such as ″Kaihizilu″ and ″The Only Interesting Newspaper″, promoting its threefold transformation: on the level of dissemination, breaking through the traditional mode of printed scripts and creating a ″narrative-focused″ newspaper text format, completing the transition from stage performance to reading at the desk; in terms of themes, surpassing traditional narratives of love and customs, focusing on contemporary issues such as anti-American sentiments, reformist debates, and the suffering of the people, elevating local experiences into national discourse; and in function, integrating the realism of news, satirical critique, and the accessibility of dialects, shifting the role of balladry from mere entertainment to a tool for enlightening the people′s minds. His creations adopted a ″three-tiered″ literary form, achieving an interweaving of classical Chinese, colloquial language and Cantonese, transforming revolutionary thought into literary expressions that resonate with the masses through local folk art, forming a path of enlightenment from the local to the national. This practice showcases the creative transformation of folk literature by modern journalists in Lingnan and serves as a typical example of the ″popularization″ transformation of vernacular literature, providing a unique literary sample for understanding the ″downward penetration″ of modern ideological enlightenment in China.
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  Artificial-Intelligence-Driven Digital-Quality Space and Justice Alignment

  QUE Tianshu, PENG Hao

  2026, 25(1): 101-112.

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  The development of artificial intelligence technology has brought about a transformation opportunities for the construction and operation of virtual and real spaces, promoting the emergence of a new form of ″Digital-quality Space″ from traditional spatial structures. With the deep embedding of technology, the digital-quality space establishes a spatial production practice pattern and spatial construction process centered on new quality productive forces through the process of ″spatial planning—data weaving—autonomous production″. However, the risks of spatial ″unfairness″ such as disorderly development, loss of subject power, and ineffective empowerment have gradually spread and formed value barriers with the growth of the ″Digital-quality Space″. Under the pursuit of the value of spatial justice, the alignment of artificial-intelligence development and security governance has become the basic path for achieving digital-quality spatial justice. It should go beyond the unbalanced thinking under unipolar centrism and further rescue the loss of ethical values of justice from the dimensions of coordination, subject power, and inclusiveness, so as to consolidate the development foundation of spatial intelligence civilization.
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  Dual-track Synchronization Mechanism: The Institutional Integration Logic of Residential Space in Urban Settlements, and Its Influence —A Case Study Based on the Inclusionary Housing System

  ZHANG Xiafei

  2026, 25(1): 113-124.

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  Current discussions on urban residential space governance against the backdrop of housing marketization mainly remain at the level of policy implementation or technical adjustments, failing to fully recognize the fundamental role of the dual-track system in urban governance institutional construction. The dual track system is not merely an auxiliary tool for resource allocation; rather, it profoundly reshapes the structure and mechanisms of urban residential governance. The ″commercial-social integration″ dual-track synchronization model, represented by inclusionary housing, has formed a new type of institutional integration characterized by temporal intervention, authoritative leadership, institutional interconnection, and multidimensional goals. This institutional model not only achieves emphasized control over social benefit distribution, exerts strengthened regulation over market entities, and imposes reinforced control within the hierarchical system, but also highlights the systemic inadequacies of existing urban governance theories in explaining the dual-track synchronization mechanism.
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  Resilient Cities Construction Driven by Digital Twin Technology: Practices, Challenges, and Strategies

  XU Xinran

  2026, 25(1): 125-136.

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  Digital twin technology, as an emerging digital concept and technical tool, has been widely recognized for its immense potential in disaster management. A case study from Shanghai demonstrates that by enabling a high-precision digital mapping of physical cities, this technology drives a paradigm shift in resilient urban governance. While significantly enhancing urban resilience and adaptability, its application also faces structural risks. These can be addressed through a five-pronged action strategy to systematically enhance city digital resilience. Research shows that digital twin technology markedly strengthens modern urban resilience through scenario reconstruction, structural transformation, and action empowerment. Future urban development requires deep integration with urban cultural and geographical context, supported by scalable urban system architecture for technological iteration. With safety-centric resilience as the core objective, cities can progress from localized optimization to city-wide synergy in resilience building.
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  Systematic Elaboration of Digital Justice Research Methodology

  LI Dejin

  2026, 25(1): 137-148.

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  In a broad sense, digital justice encompasses investigation, prosecution, adjudication and judicial administration. Within this framework, digital justice serves both as an assistive system for human judicial tasks and, potentially, as an algorithm capable of autonomous adjudicative reasoning. Accordingly, a broad-sense methodology for studying digital justice must critically review the entire case-handling process through a threefold lens: technical, doctrinal and adjudicative methods. Technically, embedding AI in adjudication promises objectivity, neutrality and efficiency. Yet it risks alienation via “algorithmic black boxes” that may frustrate fair adjudication.. Such black boxes stem from the inherent technical features of algorithms. Hence, algorithmic bias in the digital judicial process is hardly avoidable, and the verifiability of outcomes produced by digital justice remains uncertain. Doctrinally, the advent of digital technology does not subvert legal doctrine; classic categories, including the legal subject, remain valid. Doctrinal issues in the digital realm often manifest as issues within specific branches of law. Adjudicative scholarship must confront three key limitations. First, digital tools offer limited aid in fact-finding and in bridging the distance between case facts and legal norms. Second, digital justice gravitates toward uniform, similarity-driven decisions, hindering differentiated treatment of distinct cases. Third, the operational logic of digital technology may diverge from the judicial duty to decide in accordance with the law.
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  The Jurisprudential Logic and Institutional Expression of the Application of Culpa in Contrahendo to Administrative Agreements

  LIAO Yuanchen

  2026, 25(1): 149-160.

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  The values of good faith, care, and fairness inherent in civil pre-contractual obligations resonate with the modern administrative rule of law, and justify culpa in contrahendo liability when administrative authorities wrongfully impede valid agreement formation. Current rules disproportionately address performance disputes but overlook pre-contractual legal relations. Introducing culpa in contrahendo remedies for deficiencies in contractual breach liability and administrative compensation, and advance substantive dispute resolution. Institutional reform should integrate this liability into a diversified remedial framework accessible through administrative litigation. Where specific administrative statutes are absent, civil law principles shall govern compensation for failed agreement formation, invalidity, and revocation, prioritizing reliance interest—though agreements defective due to lacking approval requirements may exceptionally warrant expectation-interest compensation. Importantly, such liability must be limited where statutory pre-contractual duties remain unperformed, safeguarding the principle of legality.